JProfiler joins YourKit, NetBeans and JHat in being able to read
the hprof memory snapshot format. Why the increase in support for
what is, after all, Sun's proprietary heap dump format? I suspect
it may be response to user's requests because of the consistent
reliability of being able to produce those dumps with the
-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError option.

We've moved to having that as a standard option for our Sun JVM
processes - in production as well as in development and testing.
There is no apparent overhead (as long as you want the heap
dumped when you get that OutOfMemoryError), and the heap dump
has worked for us consistently. In fact for very large JVMs on
Windows, it's the only way we can now consistently force a heap
dump if we want one (we detailed the problems we've had with
memory profiling large JVMs on Windows
here if you are interested). I expect
to see the hprof heap dump format increasingly supported by
profilers.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Of course, with such usefulness will eventually come standardization,
and I notice there is a java.net project to specify an open binary
heap dump format heap-snapshot - wouldn't that be nice, if the JVM
heap dumps had a standard format across vendors.